Part of what makes literature "literature" - instead of, say, verbiage of the variety one finds in fine print, junk mail and street signs - is that it's in dialogue with other literary works. Mario Vargas Llosa's, The Bad Girl, wouldn't exist without Gustave Flaubert's, Madame Bovary, nor Jose Saramoga's, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, without the New Testament, but "past performance is no guarantee of future earnings" is impervious to any of the foregoing (to its - and our - detriment).
Because of this dialogue, fictional books featuring fictional author-characters often provide examples of the fictional authors' work. A.S. Byatt wrote an entire oeuvre of Romantic poetry for the fictional poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash in her novel, Posession. The World According to Garp, to take another example, contains substantial excerpts from T.S. Garp's fiction. Without these excerpts, LaMotte, Ash and Garp might exist as characters, but readers would be without any idea of how they, as writers, participate in literary dialogue (although readers see how their creators, Byatt and John Irving respectively, engage in such dialogue). In creative writing MFA-speak, without these glimpses of LaMotte's, Ash's and Garp's creative output, Byatt and Irving would merely be telling us about their writing, rather than showing us.
Perhaps surprisingly - or, rather, unsurprisingly, since Jonathan Lethem, in his New York Timesreview of 2666 notes that Roberto "Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules" - in 2666, Roberto Bolaño gives us a writer-protagonist sans examples of his writing.
Benno von Archimboldi, the nom de plume of Hans Reiter, is a post-WWII German novelist who, by the late 1990's and early 2000's, is routinely nominated for the Nobel Prize.
British and European critics are obsessed with Achimboldi - they fight academic battles over him in journals and at conferences. At one point in 2666, Jean-Luc Pelletier, a French von Achimboldi scholar, remarks
that it was surprising, or that it would never cease to surprise him, the way Archimboldi depicted pain and shame. "Delicately," said Espinoza [a colleague]. "That's right," said Pelletier. "Delicately."
(p. 143.) At another moment, Jacob Bubis, Archimboldi's publisher and a legendary editor, awakens his wife in the middle of the night to declare that they must publish Archimboldi's new novel.
"Is it good?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], half asleep and not bothering to sit up. "It's better than good," said Bubis, pacing the room. . . . . At the first light of day [Bubis] woke his wife again and made her promise that when he was no longer head of the publishing house, his euphemism for his own death, she wouldn't abandon Archimboldi. "Abandon him in what sense?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], still half asleep. "We have to protect him," he added.
(p. 815.)
Such is the information with which the reader of 2666 must make do, on which basis - on which faith - the reader must accept Archimboldi, the character and the writer. My question is: why? Why create a writer of such towering importance - to literary history (in 2666's fictional world) and to the story of 2666 - and simultaneously deprive the reader of any inkling of this writer's literary works?
Indeed, Bolaño goes farther than denying Archimboldi any opportunity to show readers his fiction and the dialogue it sparks with other literary works; Bolaño all but tells us that such dialogue is beyond Archimboldi. Largely unschooled and unread, Archimboldi grows up with a single critical text: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, from which he learns about seaweed. The only other book that Archimboldi reads during his formative years is Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. How can a writer with such a sparse and scattershot familiarity with the canon produce literature?
With Archimboldi, Bolaño seems to want to create a sui generis author - a novelist who comes out of no literary tradition, who owes no literary debts, who eschews literature as he conquers it.
This conceit is obviously the stuff of myth, but perhaps it relates to the way Bolaño saw himself: a high-school drop-out, Bolaño (according to Francisco Goldman in his review in The New York Review of Books) "blame[d] gaps in his subsequent self-education on the layout of the shelving in bookstores that prevented him from shoplifting certain books." The authorial persona Bolaño cultivated (in the words of Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books) is one of "a writer . . . who writes as if literature were all that mattered, and at the same time writes in a distinctly unliterary way."
That said, I don't believe that Archimboldi (intentionally or subliminally) is a cast in Bolaño's mold. For one thing, Bolaño, unlike Archimboldi, does not abstain from dialogue with literature; on the contrary, his work is rife with references to literary and other artistic works. Bolaño is not without literary forebears: he openly acknowledges the influence of - and withstands comparison to - Julio Cortázar (especially the novel Hopscotch) and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño's autodidactic education might have been scattershot, but it's anything but sparse; Bolaño's literary dialogue may be idiosyncratic, but it's at the core of his work - he couldn't write "as if literature were all that mattered" otherwise.
For another thing, Bolaño apparently makes a habit of writing about writers whose work remains opaque to the reader. Kunkel describes Bolaño's story "Enrique Martín," the eponymous character of which is a giftless poet about whose poetry the narrator "speaks . . . only with pity and contempt." Similarly, in Bolaño's novel, The Savage Detectives, two poets go searching for a third poet, Cesárea Tinajero, whose body of work has virtually vanished. Archimboldi is simply one of many Bolaño writer-characters whose literary works remain (literally) unwritten. (Whereas Bolaño himself is the prolific progenitor of one book of poems, three story collections and ten published novels, along with at least two novels found among his papers at the time of his death.)
Bolaño's choice to leave Archimboldi mute to literary dialogue is plainly more than an amplification of Bolaño's own (possible) personal myths . . . which is not to say that the choice is rational. Patterns that emerge across a writer's oeuvre are often not rational, but visceral, emotional, illogical or subliminal. My guess is that - consciously or unconsciously - the writer-without-an-oeuvre (of which Archimboldi is Bolaño's supreme example) served Bolaño as a symbol of mortality. To any fool who comforts him or herself with the thought that the human body will fail but the written word endures, Bolaño's oeuvre-less authors stand as a sharp reminder that, however much literature may be all that matters, the impermanence of life is a fact that overwhelms all other priorities and silences all dialogues.
Call me defensive, but I'm an honest woman, and I resent the fact that the two great artistic loves of my life are both associated with lying. I used to be an actor, which many people think synonymous with lying for a living. (Or, at least, lying on the casting couch; but resenting that the two great artistic loves of my life are both associated with whoring is another blog post.)
"I'm a very good actor," is allegedly what Sir Jock Delves Broughton said to the prosecutor, after a jury acquitted Broughton of the murder of Joss Hay, Earl of Erroll - a murder that Broughton almost certainly committed. When I read statements like that, I'm in anguish: why smear actors? Acting is a noble profession, a rigorous craft, with an esteemed history (Shakespeare, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier). We're not clowns, for Christ's sake.
Fiction is - obviously - also problemmatic. Writing down stuff that you make up is - to some people's way of thinking - a lot like lying (or the practice of law; "liar, oh sorry lawyer" used to be the favorite joke of one of my brothers). So imagine my despair to see Mario Vargas Llosa embracing - yes! embracing - the accusation of lying in his novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.
An investigation into the life of an imaginary (but based on real-life) Communist revolutionary by an imaginary (but based on real-life) Peruvian novelist, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is salted with confrontations between the novelist and his skeptical audience. "It won't be the real story, but, just as you say, a novel," the nameless novelist assures one interviewee, "A faint, remote, and, if you like, false version." (p. 66.) "'Because I'm a realist, in my novels I always try to lie knowing why I do it,'" the novelist elaborates. (p. 67.)
To another interviewee, he protests, "I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about [Alejandro Mayta] as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be an unrecognizable version of what actually happened." (p. 81.)
"[A]ll stories mix truth and lies," he concludes. (p. 118.)
Nonsense! The sloppiness - of thinking, or word usage - of confusing fiction writing with lying makes me bristle with indignation. Detective work involves following a factual path to the truth; fiction writing - and acting, as well - entails discovery of an imaginary path to the truth. Writing fiction is the creation of a description or account that makes the reader recognize: yes, this is just what life is like.
Lying, by contrast, is not about truth, but deceit. While fiction aims for the enlightenment that comes from being able to accept reality, lying achieves its purpose by tricking people into remaining ignorant.
Of course, I'm so in love with Vargas Llosa's work, that I'll forgive him anything - even a difference of opinion. His repeated insistence on his own lies in Alejandro Mayta is meant to illustrate a larger social phenomenon: "Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary." (p. 246.)
Nonetheless, I think Vargas Llosa is selling himself short; taking refuge from reality in an illusion is quite different than what Vargas Llosa is doing: confronting the reader with the desolation and despair that they might otherwise deny. And I suspect that Vargas Llosa understands the difference. As his novelist protagonist responds to one tough customer, who demands: "'Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?' Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does, since I'm doing it." (p. 140.)
As difficult as writing fiction is, I'm thankful that I'm not a non-fiction writer. James Fox's White Mischief, which I recently finished, confirmed my sense that sustaining the reader's (or this reader's) interest over a the course of a long work of non-fiction is a task so thankless as to be not worth attempting. A plea: writers of non-fiction, can't you wrap it up in 20,000 words?
White Mischief is a journalistic-historical account of the murder of Josslyn Hay (a/k/a Earl of Erroll), an event which effectively ended the Happy Valley era for Kenya's white colonialists. The story ought to be interesting. All the characters, even those tangentially involved, were glamorous, scandalous, drug-and-sex addled adventurers, many of them fabulously wealthy, who did things about which people like to gossip: attempted suicide, attempted murder, abandoned their children, kept wild animals as pets, mistreated their servants, slept around.
In James Fox's hands, however, the story becomes . . . long. Because Fox devoted years to investigating the story, he wants to write about his investigation. The resulting meta-narrative detour introduces the reader to the boring, authorially self-involved, and irrelevant aspects of Fox's tale. Fox, unlike his Happy Valley subjects - sadly - seems not to have attempted suicide or murder, abondoned his child, kept a beast as a pet, mistreated his help staff, or indulged in promiscuous sex.
Fox does, however, admire the deceased writer and gourmand Cyril Connolly, who spent the later years of his life obsessed with the Joss Hay murder. While I can appreciate Fox's tribute to Connolly, his mentor and writing partner - and the source of Fox's own obsession with the case - only someone who knew Connolly personally could appreciate the lavish detail with which Fox recounts what Connolly ate and drank at their meetings. I, on the other hand, don't care.
Purely out of luck, as I was wondering, "How could Fox have told this story without the boring bits?" I began reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and I had my answer. Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is about unearthing the truth about a violent event that happened more than twenty years previously. Moreover, Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is as much about the investigation of the event as it is about the event itself. Unlike Fox's book, however, Vargas Llosa's is fascinating.
Vargas Llosa uses a technique of seamlessly intersplicing his account of the investigation and the event itself. In Alejandro Mayta, a nameless novelist in 1983 interviews people with relevant information about Mayta, a Communist revolutionary in 1958 Peru. Vargas Llosa interweaves the testimony of each of these interviewees, along with a first person account of the interviews, with a third person narrative of the events that occurred 25 year previously. The first person account of the interviews is supposed to be "real," while the third person narrative is supposed to be "fiction." The technique works brilliantly, not merely to generate a page-turning story, but also to probe questions of consequence, like, "How can we ever know the truth about historic events?" and "Why is fiction sometimes a better vehicle for truth than non-fiction?"
To compare Vargas Llosa and Fox is unfair. Vargas Llosa consistently and prolifically produces books of astonishing skill; Fox is a hack. With Alejandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa wrote a po-mo novel; Fox's book is more of an extended feature article for a newspaper's Sunday magazine.
Still, however unfair, the comparison sharply reveals - to my mind - the superiority of fiction as a medium. Freedom from the bondage of facts releases the author from the tiresome task of shaping a page-turner out of life's petty story lines; instead, the author's challenge is to imagine a story line that's also a page turner. The former is a problem of organizing information; the latter is a problem of art. For the both (this) author and (this) reader, the choice of which book is more worthwhile is clear.
A resonant thought after reading The Feast of the Goat is the remarkable similarity of the characteristics and crimes of autocratic regimes. Trujillo's accomplishment was reducing the citizenry of the Dominican Republic to a state where -- in the view of Mario Vargas Llosa -- their only remaining hope of dignity was to die nobly. That horrendous state was the hallmark of all the worst regimes of the 20th century (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, P.W. Botha -- the list is shamefully long, and this assembly is under-inclusive).
It's not to the U.S.'s credit that, of the people it has placed in this state in the last eight years, most have not been its own citizens.
Mario Vargas Llosa does it all: page turners, tight plots, effortlessly-readable sentences; full-bodied, fleshed out characters; global locales; exploration of the big, literary themes. Vargas Llosa pins the world beneath his pen, compelling it to stop turning just long enough for you to take it all in greedily, reading.
I've heard The Feast of the Goat, which I have just finished, described as his best book, and although I haven't read as deeply into the Vargas Llosa oeuvre as I will, I feel confident that The Feast of the Goat -- though captivating -- will not be my favorite. The Feast of the Goat can be characterized as being, in some respects, a novelistic equivalent of the Red Cross report on torture in Guantanamo: no matter how important, correct, thought-provoking, and well-written it is, you still wish it didn't exist.
But for all the horror, Vargas Llosa's insights into the human condition are compelling. One aspect of The Feast of the Goat that particularly interested me was Vargas Llosa's depiction of the slow "deaths" people in the Dominican Republic "died" by way of having their personalities and integrity eroded and corrupted by the Trujillo regime. As Vargas Llosa writes about Antonio de la Maza, one of Trujillo's assassins, Trujillo had "killed [de la Maza] in stages, taking away his decency, his honor, his self-respect, his joy in living, his hopes and desires, turning him into a sack of bones tormented by the guilty conscience that had been destroying him gradually for so many years." (p. 90.)
Having lived for more than four years in China, I've seen people stumbling around in this state of slow death, and I've felt -- far at a distance, but still perceptible; still necessary to resist -- the pressures of an autocratic regime. My knee-jerk thought, reading Vargas Llosa's description of the slow death of Antonio de la Maza, was that de la Maza was too passive. How can Trujillo "take away his deceny, his honor, his self-respect"? I thought. De la Maza has to fight for those qualities, stand up for himself. ("Oppression . . . takes two," writes Waltern Kirn, reviewing The Feast of the Goat for The New York Times Book Review.) That's why we admire people with moral integrity: it's a quality that's only obtained by being tested and challenged.
But after my first impression thinking mellowed, I reflected that a "slow death" is aptly named; like it's faster counterpart, resistance is futile. The human capacity for living is a complex thing, with invisible parts and irrational aspects that can weigh as heavily as the biological. And it's surprisingly tender. Even a domestic tyrant can choke off an individual from the artery of life. Disappointments of a magnitude far smaller than the 31 vile years of the Trujillo regime can leave a person in a state of slow death, cradling a part in need of mourning, infuriated that the remainder is expected to carry on as before, though no longer whole.
Vargas Llosa's view of the slow death is severe: it's not metaphoric; what it kills is dead forever. Antonio de la Maza, already dead in all but his physical state at the book's opening, hoped that assassinating Trujillo would, in some way, resurrect him by making him worthy of living. But Vargas Llosa takes a dim view of a revenge as a restorative. De la Maza dies in a storm of bullets, and in the characters of Ramfis Trujillo and Urania Cabral, Vargas Llosa depicts vengeance as ruining its practitioners.
For de la Maza and his brethren, Vargas Llosa sees only one possibility of redemption: the dignity and nobility with which they end their physical existences. After the assassination, Ramfis Trujillo rounds up most of the assasins -- and their families -- and tortures them with an extremity of cruelty that sickens. De la Maza is already physically dead by this time in the book, but his father Don Vicente de la Maza is imprisoned and tortured. When Ramfis confronts Don Vicente with news of his son's death, Don Vicente asks only, "Did he die fighting?" When Ramfis nods, the father replies, "Thank you, Lord!" (p. 338.)
Appreciating such expert depictions of the worst extremes of human capacity is not easy. Like the Domincans who, repeatedly in The Feast of the Goat, couldn't hold Trujillo's gaze, the impulse when confronting a feast of horrors on the scale of Trujillo's regime is to look away. Vargas Llosa's adeptness at compelling our attention is impossible not to admire.
Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, The Bad Girl, is a fabulous read, despite the sorry translation of the title. In Spanish, Vargas Llosa's Madame Bovary-inspired romp is called Travesuras de la Niña Mala, which roughly translates as "The Naughty Tricks of the Bad Girl." The Bad Girl isn't half as fun (or marketable) a title.
But the English-language title can't dampen the liveliness that Vargas Llosa infuses into Madame Bovary's plot and (especially) characterization. This vivacity derives from two factors. First, Vargas Llosa has empathy -- perhaps even too much -- for his Bad Girl and Ricardo, the stand-ins for Emma and Charles Bovary. Unlike Flaubert, who famously wrote, "Bovary bores me, Bovary irritates me, the vulgarity of the subject gives me bouts of nausea" (quoted in The New Yorker), Vargas Llosa is plainly aroused by his Bad Girl. Her travesuras are -- far from being boring, irritating and vulgar -- something close to the meaning of life. As for Ricardo, he's no pathetic medical-officer-masquerading-as-a-doctor, no joke-hat wearing, club-foot tormenting butt of the author's derision. To the contrary, Ricardo is fidelity personified, the yin to Bad Girl's yang, the oppositional force without which the Bad Girl's travesuras have no power.
Second, Vargas Llosa has the benefit of writing post-Freud. Characterization in the age of the psychotherapist is, quite naturally, psychological. Flaubert's characters, however, are psycholgoically flat. We see -- ad nauseum we see -- their actions, but we are not privy to any depth of thought, and so their actions pile up, page after page, without our caring (until the accretion suddenly collapses Emma's world in the last 50 pages, and we do care -- we are horrified -- at the speed and force of the tornado that spins her to death).
In places, Flaubert implies that the superficiality of his characters' thought is the very reason we should condemn them. Seeing "Amor nel cor" (love in my heart) on his seal, Rodolphe realizes that it's the wrong message to imprint on his "I'm dumping you" letter to Emma. "Oh well, who cares!" he concludes, before smoking three pipes and going to sleep (p. 189).
But Flaubert's psychologically bereft characterization is not entirely by design; it's also of necessity. Pre-Freud, people didn't think with the same self-awareness as they do now. Actions didn't demand the same kinds of explanations -- I did it because my parents were mean to me; I suffered in my youth -- as they do now. Vargas Llosa's Bad Girl therefore has a backstory that allows the reader, if inclined, to excuse her.
Of course, the Bad Girl's sob story is no excuse. Going from rags-to-riches is no exemption from the simple respect of human dignity that we owe others, regardles of their status. Nor does childhood hardship waive the duties of maturity. Vargas Llosa believes this (and punishes the Bad Girl accordingly), but he doesn't really feel it (I suspect -- his Bad Girl has him wrapped around her finger). Still, the richness of the Bad Girl's psychological development, however halting, and the excruciating psychological pain Ricardo suffers -- touchingly rendered -- make the story a page turner where Madame Bovary is (in parts) a soporific.
Part of what makes literature "literature" - instead of, say, verbiage of the variety one finds in fine print, junk mail and street signs - is that it's in dialogue with other literary works. Mario Vargas Llosa's, The Bad Girl, wouldn't exist without Gustave Flaubert's, Madame Bovary, nor Jose Saramoga's, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, without the New Testament, but "past performance is no guarantee of future earnings" is impervious to any of the foregoing (to its - and our - detriment).
